Confluent Partnership

Here at Rittman Mead, we are continually broadening the scope and expertise of our services to help our customers keep pace with today's ever-changing technology landscape. One significant change we have seen over the last few years is the increased adoption of data streaming. These solutions can help solve a variety of problems, from real-time data analytics to forming the entire backbone of an organisation's data architecture. We have worked with a number of different technologies that can enable this, however, we often see that Kafka ticks the most boxes.

This is reflected by some of the recent blog posts you will have seen like Tom Underhill hooking up his gaming console to Kafka and Paul Shilling’s piece on collating sailing data. Both these posts try and use day to day or real-world examples to demonstrate some of the concepts behind Kafka.

In conjunction with these, we have been involved in more serious proofs of concepts and project with clients involving Kafka, which no doubt we will write about in time. To help us further our knowledge and also immerse ourselves in the developer community we have decided to become Confluent partners. Confluent was founded by the people who initially developed Kafka at LinkedIn and provides a managed and supported version of Kafka through their platform.

We chose Confluent as we saw them as the driving force behind Kafka, plus the additions they are making to the platform such as the streaming API and KSQL are opening a lot of doors for how streamed data can be used.

We look forward to growing our knowledge and experience in this area and the possibilities that working with both Kafka and Confluent will bring us.